Maren Morris opens up about decision to leave ‘toxic’ country music scene

Morris is a rare advocate for LGBT+ rights in the country music scene

Maren Morris has expanded on her recently announced decision to exit the country music scene due to its part in the culture wars.

“I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over,” she said of the genre in a 15 September interview with the Los Angeles Times. “But it’s burning itself down without my help.”

“The Middle” singer posited that people who were “misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic” had been empowered during the Donald Trump presidency, and this had resulted in a “hyper-masculine branch of country music”, which she called “butt rock”.

In Wednesday’s episode of The New York Times’ Popcast podcast, the singer-songwriter said she could not “participate in the really toxic arms” of country music in Nashville.

“I love living in Nashville, I have my family. There’s a reason why people come there from L.A. and New York to write with us. It’s because we have amazing songwriters there. That’s not gonna change,” Morris, 33, said.

But, she added: “I couldn’t do this circus anymore – feeling like l have to absorb and explain people’s bad behaviours and laugh it off. I just couldn’t do that after 2020 particularly. I’ve changed. A lot of things changed about me that year.”

She explained that “leaving country music” was a slight exaggeration; however, she “certainly can’t participate in a lot of it”. She added that she has asked for her work to not be considered at country music award shows.

Maren Morris (Getty Images for Elton John AIDS)

On 15 September, Morris released the songs “The Tree” and “Get the Hell Out of Here”, the lyrics of which address her estrangement from the genre.

“I hung around longer than anyone should / You’ve broken my heart more than anyone could,” she sings in “The Tree.”

Morris has been involved in a feud with fellow country artist Jason Aldean and his wife Brittany Kerr Aldean following transphobic comments they made in August last year.

Aldean faced a storm of criticism in recent months over the music video for his recent single, “Try That in a Small Town.”

The visuals feature alarmist news footage of violent clashes between demonstrators and police officers, petty crime and flag-burning. Critics called the song “racist” and a “lynching anthem” after learning that the music video was filmed outside the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where 18-year-old Black teenager Henry Choate was lynched in 1927. The location was also the site of the Columbia race riot in 1946.

Asked about the song’s success in the charts, Morris said: “People are streaming these songs out of spite. It’s not out of true joy or love of the music. It’s to own the libs. And that’s so not what music is intended for. Music is supposed to be the voice of the oppressed — the actual oppressed. And now it’s being used as this really toxic weapon in culture wars.”